


The Weight of Light

by miscellea



Series: We Didn't Start the Fire [2]
Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Steve has a lot of FEELINGS, Steve is a fustrated artist, Tony's mouth isn't in this one so the rating is lower, background piece, pre-Steve/Tony - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-09 10:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/454299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miscellea/pseuds/miscellea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers opens his eyes to the afternoon light. </p><p>A woman is sitting in a chair next to his bed. She glances up as he struggles to sit up and says “Hello…” in this husky contralto that is as dark and complicated as a tall glass of stout. She closes her book and places it cover down in her lap, but he can read the spine. It says ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’</p><p>He wonders if he’s still dreaming and if that is some bizarre message from his subconscious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Weight of Light

Steve is dreaming.

He feels weightless or maybe like he’s wrapped in cotton. Either way he is warm and supported from every angle. Nothing hurts and his thoughts have stilled. The ice is gone and somehow he is safe. He doesn’t know how that came to be, but it has.

So this is death… strange. He’d been expecting more harp music and maybe Bucky showing him the sights, but this is more than all right. He feels like he could rest forever just like this –and so he drifts at peace in the soft darkness.

Until he isn’t.

The silence begins to wear at him. The darkness becomes cloying. He has rested until he can rest no more, but his eyes won’t open and too late he wonders if maybe he didn’t go to Heaven after all.

Voices intrude on the darkness and he would swim towards them if only he could remember how.

 _He’s not responding_. A man; impatient and maybe worried. _It might be time to wean him off the_ …

 _Do it_. That one is a woman; husky, calm, and collected –someone either who knows what she’s doing or can do a convincing imitation. He likes her already.

Are they talking about him? He can’t tell. Thinking it hard, but gets easier by increments the more he tries.

The voices come and go. Steve can pick out phrases like ‘rudimentary neurological function’ and ‘tissue regeneration’, but the concepts are elusive and the words aren’t ones that come easily to him. He is a soldier. Once he was a painter. The weight of light and supply chains are things he can comprehend.

At long last the darkness recedes all on its own.

He becomes aware of the faint rasp of boiled cotton sheets on his skin and the scent of carbolic soap in the air. There is someone in the room with him. He can hear them breathing and the rustle paper as they page through a book. In the distance he can hear a radio. There’s a baseball game on.

Steve Rogers opens his eyes to the afternoon light.

A woman is sitting in a chair next to his bed. She glances up as he struggles to sit up and says “Hello…” in this husky contralto that is as dark and complicated as a tall glass of stout. She closes her book and places it cover down in her lap, but he can read the spine. It says ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’

He wonders if he’s still dreaming and if that is some bizarre message from his subconscious.

“Good morning.” The woman says. A wry smile plays around her lips, which are painted with something dark and glossy that shimmers gold in the light. He’s seen cosmetics before –hunted for them even on the black market because Peggy only wore the one shade of Elizabeth Arden red and didn’t get a lot of time off-base… but he’s never seen any like that. “How are we feeling?”

Steve tries to take stock, but a sense of unease is preying upon him. Something is wrong, very wrong. One by one, his instincts point out the flaws in his seemingly perfect environment; windows that admit light without breeze, the unfamiliar cut of the woman’s clothing, the sound of a baseball game playing on the radio… one he attended in 1941…

“Where am I?” He asks, pushing down the panic that claws its way up the back of his throat. He should be dead. The plane went down over the ice pack. He remembers the black water, the cold like _knives_ …

“Safe.” The woman says, but her eyes are blank and shiny; all surface reflection that reveal nothing of her depths. She has the eyes of a spy.

The panic surges. This time he doesn’t even try to fight it.

000

SHIELD gets him an apartment three blocks away from the building he grew up in that is now a parking garage.

His mother taught him never to think ill of anyone without good evidence so he chooses to believe that it was just an oversight on someone’s part.

It’s a small place, but that’s one thing about New York that has never changed. The difference is that he has hot running water and shiny steel appliances as a matter of course. The carpets are all new and no one had to pay extra.

The place is kind of sparse. There’s only the minimum of furniture; a bed, a folding table in the kitchen, a box from some place called Walmart that contains some kitchen utensils and a service for two. He has a budget to furnish the place further, but that means having to go out into the world to find a thrift shop or maybe that Walmart place … and Steve can’t face that yet. He just can’t.

A nice young lady living next door teaches him about the internet, about Google, and Wikipedia then asks him if he was raised by the Amish or in Utah (why _Utah_?). Steve dodges her questions and tries to come up with a more convincing story for next time.

The joke is on him. There is no next time. Both his neighbors vanish overnight and anonymous men in mover’s jackets arrive for their belongings. It doesn’t take a genius to see Fury’s delicate fist in the proceedings.

There are new neighbors a few days later; a polished woman with unnaturally white and even teeth framed by dark brown lipstick on one side and a man who bumbles around in suspenders on the other. They both of them are only too pleased to make his acquaintance and have PhDs hanging on the walls somewhere in their apartments. They ask him questions and spend entirely too much time discussing his state of mental health.

Steve answers at first because they are his neighbors and he believes in manners even when he doesn’t want to be polite, but the questions never stop and always seem to go in directions that he doesn’t feel comfortable discussing with strangers. So after a while he trots out his USO smile whenever they veer into forbidden territory.

It’s a trick he borrowed from one of the chorus girls he used to work with back in the day; a brilliant shiny smile is almost as good a barrier as his real shield.

The girl’s name was Veronica and she wasn’t really a chorus girl even though she was part of the dance line. She actually had the only other solo piece in their act; a widow’s mournful lament about the man she lost to Ol’ Adolph. She played some fairly major roles on Broadway and was working with the USO to contribute to the war effort. Ronnie was the one who taught him how to handle the press.

“Smile and wave, Steve.” She told him once. The entire stage crew had been crammed into this one van and someone had produced a flask of whiskey that was making the rounds. Steve didn’t bother with alcohol and gave Ronnie the right to his share. In exchange she taught him the little things that made life on the road easier; how to pack light, why to tip the bellhops, how to deal with backstage politics, how to maintain a public image. “Answer the good questions. Pretend you didn’t hear the bad ones. Then give everyone a big friendly smile and don’t ever let them see you sweat.”

So Steve answers the nice questions, ignores the intrusive ones, flashes great big smiles (the sort that make people think he’s kinda dim), and never lets them see him so much as blink.

He doesn’t think the doctors are fooled, but they can’t get a metaphorical foothold to prove it so he counts it as a win.

000

The television arrives without a note. Steve puts it together out of curiosity and ends up having to go next door to get one of the neighbors to explain the bit about ‘hooking up your cable’. Which cable? The box had a lot of cables inside it.

‘Cable’ is apparently short for ‘cable television’ and it’s like the outside world is trying to claw its way in through a window, which is something Steve has had legitimately terrifying nightmares about.

He watches because it makes sense and even he knows he can’t hide in his apartment forever. He might as well start inoculating himself against the Outside now.

This is how he discovers ‘reality’ television and it is so intensely depressing that he can’t really formulate a coherent explanation as to why.

In the New York Steve grew up in, if a girl turned up pregnant at sixteen she did not get the rapt attention of the nation. There was a quiet wedding, angry brothers, a year in the household of a distant relative, or a very quiet trip to a back street clinic.

Nick at Nite is all right. It is sort of calming to see something in black and white when the rest of the programming is in unrelenting color. From there he finds his way to the history channel which is both reassuring and depressing at the same time. The Discovery channel is safer and Steve kind of develops an addiction to Mythbusters that he can’t even begin to explain.

It probably has to do with some extremely cathartic explosions. Steve has often thought longingly of just lobbing a mortar into the fool washing machine that is somehow smarter than he is and refuses to _just wash his clothes_ already. The episode where they make the water heater blow literally through the roof is funny until he opens what turns out to be the door to his utility closet and realizes he has the exact same kind in his apartment.

That is how he ends up on the internet researching tankless water heaters and probably confuses the hell out of whoever it is who has the sad task of monitoring his browser history.

Tankless water heaters lead him to the ‘green movement’, which leads him to a ‘blog’ about eliminating your carbon footprint. Then he has to Google ‘global warming’ and subsequently has very serious thoughts about sneaking out of his apartment in the dead of night to build a shack in the mountains.

He talks himself out of it. Barely.

000

“What do you mean ‘investments’?” Steve asks the man Fury has sent to discuss the topic of Steve’s MIA benefits. He’s aware that he’s entitled to a little back pay because he went missing while on active duty, but he’d made something like $2000 a year in the army and that was relatively high considering he was an officer in foreign service. People these days make that in a _month_. He is not expecting an embarrassment of riches. “How much are we talking here?”

“You case is somewhat unique.” The accountant straightens his tie. “There was some confusion as to how much you might be owed. There is a large difference between what a soldier of your rank and experience would be paid today as opposed to the time when you… well. When you disappeared. The decision was made to determine your back pay year by year. Moreover, your earnings are subject to interest. The grand total will be… impressive –so impressive that the US Armed Forces will have to make a partial payment to you now and pay the rest in yearly increments. Those payments will also include interest. I don’t know for sure what the final total will be.”

“Can you ballpark it for me?” Steve insists because the man’s office has that same bland sterility to it that most public buildings have in this new world. No one decorates their own workplaces anymore beyond a single hardy plant or a discrete photograph. That job goes to ‘interior designers’ who make everything look the same. The goal seems to be for them to remove all evidence of individual personality. Sometimes that makes Steve feel like he’s talking to clockwork robots instead of actual living people and it makes his skin crawl.

The accountant frowns, but finally writes down a number on a square sheet of yellow paper that has a sticky band on the back. “This will be the amount of the first payment. It is roughly one-third of the pay you are owed.”

Steve blinked at the number, rubs his eyes, and then reads it again. “That… can’t be correct.”

“It is correct, Captain Rogers.” The man insists.

“Look, I’m not so behind the times that I don’t know that America has a massive deficit. This is taxpayer money that I haven’t actually earned.” Steve’s skin is literally crawling now; hot and itchy. The number on the ‘post-it’ note is roughly twice the money he knew existed in the entire world. “Adjust the yearly whatever to what I made in 1941.”

“You are the reason most of the United States is alive today if the wreckage of the Red Skull’s destroyer plane is anything to go by. This is the very _minimum_ you are owed.” The accountant’s jaw is firm and it is obvious he has no plans to budge in the slightest. “Let the federal government worry about the deficit. America will pay her debts. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t start with you.”

“I… yes, sir.” Steve sags in his chair.

“Don’t worry, Captain.” The man assures him. “You’re going to enjoy being a millionaire.”

000

Steve walks home because the idea of being a _millionaire_ sits in his throat like he tried to swallow a live frog. It’s hot and squirming and he can’t forget about it even for a second.

What do you even _do_ with that much money? It's not like he's Howard who had a million hobbies and even more ideas to fund.

The accountant is full of ideas, all of which are purly hypothetical until the first check gets cut. Steve is glad he doesn’t have to think about them until later. As it is, his ‘to google’ list now includes things like ‘Roth IRAs’ and ‘compound interest’.

He’s so involved in his own thoughts that he almost walks past the store without seeing it. He stops in the middle of the sidewalk and backtracks to it.

The store is called ‘Utrechts’ and the front window is full of sale notices and some artfully posed products. It’s an art supply store and Steve stands there for a moment, caught in an old memory of standing in front of the stationary store as a kid in his old neighborhood with his nose pressed against the glass wishing he had just enough money for some new paper so he wouldn’t have to use the back of old advertisements anymore.

He breathes a sigh and starts to go… until it hits him. He _does_ have money. He has money _right now_ from his SHIELD stipend and the opportunity to take back something he’d lost long before he’d ever even heard the word ‘HYDRA’.

A bell jangles overhead as he goes inside. Three hours later he emerges with three loaded shopping bags and a disassembled easel in a box balanced on one shoulder.

He looks really weird on the subway, but for the first time in a while he arrives in his apartment with a sense of anticipation rather than dread.

Finally he has something to _do_.

It’s a good feeling.

000

“No, you’re using your wrist again. The entire arm stays immobile. All the motion comes from your shoulder.”

The art class is something Steve decided to do on a whim to force himself to go outside. His formal art education is pretty much null and if the portly woman teaching figure drawing at the community center is to be believed, he’s taught himself some _very_ bad habits.

“Better.” She says, peering at the pile of cardboard boxes taking shape on his paper. She’s only tangentially aware of him; more interested in what he’s doing than who he is. If she leans close then it’s because she’s trying to get an idea of his perspective. “Use the pencil to judge the proportions of your subject material, although you don’t seem to have a problem with that right now. Still; always check.”

“Yes ma’am.” Steve says and gets a friendly swat upside the head for his troubles.

“Don’t call me ‘ma’am’.” She says. “Ma’am is my mother.”

Steve ducks his head to hide his smile. “Yes, Professor.” He corrects himself.

“Better.” She moves on and promptly forgets that Steve exists when she lays eyes on his neighbor’s work.

Steve attends the class religiously just for the relieving sensation of being nearly anonymous until the day the teacher meets him at the door and tells him point blank that there isn’t anything else she can teach him. She gives him a flyer for local life drawing and croquis sessions, but they aren’t quite the same.

He stays home and sketches there, but his work goes flat and his inspiration peters out… or worse, he finds himself drawing old faces over and over again. He finds himself in the gymnasium down the street more often taking out his pent up frustrations on the equipment there.

Something is going to have to give soon, because he isn’t sure how long he can carry on like this.

**Author's Note:**

> Part two of 'We Didn't Start the Fire'. Steve has a LOT of issues. He's about to get a few more.
> 
> Next up, these crazy kids meet up and go chasing after a Hulk. Because of reasons.


End file.
